Location: Lincoln Middle School Class: 6th grade general science Date of Visit: September 30, 2013
Observation/Reflection #2: Eyes in the Back of Your Head: Observing Student Actions From a seat in the rear of the room, observe your students and take notes on what they are doing while the teacher is presenting in the front of the room, while they are supposed to be taking notes, doing seatwork, and/or when they are working in the lab. Look closely at each student for a range of behaviors, and resist the temptation on only see what you expect. Note especially what is happening furthest from the teacher.What strategies are used by your CT to encourage students to attend and engage? Watch carefully how your CT moves around the room. Draw a map of the classroom and sketch a path showing (approximately) this movement.How important is student engagement to your view of how you will teach? What strategies will you employ to encourage student engagement? How will use your proximity to provide feedback and manage student behavior?
Observation:
The way the classroom in which I observed is arranged, there is little room in the back of the classroom. I instead took a seat off to the side in the front of the room. However, because of the layout of the room, I could still see all the students in the classroom. At the beginning of the class, students worked diligently on their warm-up exercise until they were finished. Some of the students who finished early sat quietly and patiently, but others started to fidget and doodle in their notebooks. They were not, however, disruptive to others. When the teacher reviewed the answers to the exercise, all of the students were paying rapt attention and correcting any mistakes on their papers with their correcting pens. After this warm-up, the students watch a brief video introduction to their next laboratory exercise regarding paper planes. While most of the students paid attention to the video clip, a couple of girls in the very back of the room began to whisper to one another. The teacher did not notice this activity going on, but the video clip was less than three minutes long so the misbehavior did not last for an extended period of time. The teacher then explained the purpose of the laboratory exercises, and the students filled out a laboratory report packet with a purpose statement and background information. During this activity, the teacher moved about the room answering student questions and regulating any misbehavior that occurred. In general, the students were very well-behaved and stayed on task. Either than a few comments out of turn here and there, the overall behavior of the class was outstanding.
Reflection:
Student engagement is crucial to my view of how I will teach. As I have mentioned in past written assignments for this course, my goal as a teacher is to keep students engaged and actively learning at all times, from the beginning of the period until the end. This does not mean conducting a boring lecture from the time the first bell rings until the time the second bell dismisses them. I hope to keep students engaged by involving them in fun, interesting, and exciting laboratory activities that help them to learn important scientific concepts while also enjoying being in my class. In order to encourage student engagement, I will use these activities to vary my instruction so as not to make my class boring or predictable. I also aim to be just as involved with the activities as the students are, circulating through the classroom working with individual students or small groups in order to simultaneously manage classroom behavior and supplement my instruction in an informal, personal manner. The most successful teachers that I have observed have employed these techniques and the students have almost always responded well. I hope to one day emulate my cooperating teacher and those others who practice a teaching philosophy that is similar to mine.
Class: 6th grade general science
Date of Visit: September 30, 2013
Observation/Reflection #2: Eyes in the Back of Your Head: Observing Student Actions
From a seat in the rear of the room, observe your students and take notes on what they are doing while the teacher is presenting in the front of the room, while they are supposed to be taking notes, doing seatwork, and/or when they are working in the lab. Look closely at each student for a range of behaviors, and resist the temptation on only see what you expect. Note especially what is happening furthest from the teacher.What strategies are used by your CT to encourage students to attend and engage? Watch carefully how your CT moves around the room. Draw a map of the classroom and sketch a path showing (approximately) this movement.How important is student engagement to your view of how you will teach? What strategies will you employ to encourage student engagement? How will use your proximity to provide feedback and manage student behavior?
Observation:
The way the classroom in which I observed is arranged, there is little room in the back of the classroom. I instead took a seat off to the side in the front of the room. However, because of the layout of the room, I could still see all the students in the classroom. At the beginning of the class, students worked diligently on their warm-up exercise until they were finished. Some of the students who finished early sat quietly and patiently, but others started to fidget and doodle in their notebooks. They were not, however, disruptive to others. When the teacher reviewed the answers to the exercise, all of the students were paying rapt attention and correcting any mistakes on their papers with their correcting pens. After this warm-up, the students watch a brief video introduction to their next laboratory exercise regarding paper planes. While most of the students paid attention to the video clip, a couple of girls in the very back of the room began to whisper to one another. The teacher did not notice this activity going on, but the video clip was less than three minutes long so the misbehavior did not last for an extended period of time. The teacher then explained the purpose of the laboratory exercises, and the students filled out a laboratory report packet with a purpose statement and background information. During this activity, the teacher moved about the room answering student questions and regulating any misbehavior that occurred. In general, the students were very well-behaved and stayed on task. Either than a few comments out of turn here and there, the overall behavior of the class was outstanding.
Reflection:
Student engagement is crucial to my view of how I will teach. As I have mentioned in past written assignments for this course, my goal as a teacher is to keep students engaged and actively learning at all times, from the beginning of the period until the end. This does not mean conducting a boring lecture from the time the first bell rings until the time the second bell dismisses them. I hope to keep students engaged by involving them in fun, interesting, and exciting laboratory activities that help them to learn important scientific concepts while also enjoying being in my class. In order to encourage student engagement, I will use these activities to vary my instruction so as not to make my class boring or predictable. I also aim to be just as involved with the activities as the students are, circulating through the classroom working with individual students or small groups in order to simultaneously manage classroom behavior and supplement my instruction in an informal, personal manner. The most successful teachers that I have observed have employed these techniques and the students have almost always responded well. I hope to one day emulate my cooperating teacher and those others who practice a teaching philosophy that is similar to mine.